The Theatre Merveilleux
by mj728
Summary: The highly-acclaimed Theatre Merveilleux is a beauty on the outside with its line to enter always wrapped around the corner. But on the inside, the talented players of the stage go through loyalty and betrayal, forbidden romance and heartbreak, deadly lies and the dangerous games that go with them in the most entertaining industry in the world: showbiz. All the world's a stage...AU
1. Chapter 1

**Summary: **The shining Theatre Merveilleux has been standing on the corner of the most famous street in New York City since its inception in 1900. The gleaming building is a beauty from the outside with faceted glass windows, gilded gold accents, bright spotlights reflecting off of every surface, and its line to get in always wrapped around the corner. But on the inside, the famously talented players of this stage go through loyalty and betrayal, forbidden romance and heartbreak, deadly lies and the dangerous games that go along with them in the most entertaining industry in the world: showbiz. All the world's a stage...but who is the ultimate player? AU.

**AN: **Did anyone else do NaNo this year? I certainly tried, but alas, with homework, high school, and life, I in no way made 50,000 words (sob). But I wrote a few chapters of a Glee story I was thinking of for a few months, and now that NaNo is over, I thought I'd post it here :)

I'm so excited for this story, I love doing an actual Glee narrative, especially AU, and I love the concept. I think of it as like a mix of theatre drama and Desperate Housewives (both things I love). I really hope you enjoy it, I have many chapters typed up so far so I'll debate when to post them depending on the feedback. Enjoy! :)

**Disclaimer: **I do not own any part of Glee. Everything belongs to Ryan Murphy and its creators.

* * *

**Chapter 1**

_Oh my man, I love him so_

_He'll never know_

_All my life is just a spare_

_But I don't care_

The theatre is hushed, a tentative silence settling over the audience leaning forward in their red cushioned seats; they've been waiting to see this show for weeks, while their tickets have been reserved for twice that long.

The critically acclaimed singer's trembling alto voice draws in the crowd, making them concentrate on only her, her glowing black dress, the tears falling down her cheeks. She sings of loss and heartbreak, her eyes shining brightly with wetness, body almost collapsing within itself out of pain. They feel they can relate to her disparity, her afflictions, her unyielding sorrow.

_It cost me a lot_

_But there's one thing that I got_

_It's my man_

_Cold and wet, I regret_

_But all that I'd soon forget_

_With my man_

She's become angrier now, her voice building up tension and echoing off the thick theatre walls. The song amplifies, the piano is played with more force, the audience's anticipation grows. They lean even closer towards her, though the immense noise of her ballad vibrates all around them.

But then, suddenly, it's not anger anymore. It's neither sadness nor pain, just sheer pure force of need for love.

_What's the difference if I saaaay?_

_I'll go away_

_When I know I'll come back on my knees someday_

She knows she has them now. Their wide-eyed, open-mouthed faces are priceless. Every person who comes to see the show is intrigued and unable to look away for every single scene, already deciding by act 2 that it's the single most extraordinary performance they've ever seen. The reviews and old-time notoriety of the theatre house lure them in; the charming actors with devious and comical characters and voices as smooth as spilling honey are what seal the deal. And what will make them remember this very play, remember every line, every placement of each prop, what will make them rave on and on about it to every person they knew, is her. The star, the lead singer, the strikingly beautiful and "astoundingly talented", as the newspapers say, actress who plays the desperate heroine. She's the one the theatre critics from New York City to Los Angeles call the true "star of the show".

_For whatever my man is_

_I am his _

_Foreeeeeveeeer _

_Moooooore_

Everyone in the theatre stands immediately and begins clapping, cheering, shouting uncontrollably. The noise is deafening, so loud that her voice and the final notes of the song bellowing from the pit orchestra are drowned out.

Her favorite thing about the finale of the first act is in the beginning, when she's solitarily standing with a single spotlight shining on her weeping face, the theatre is so quiet you would be able to hear a pin drop. But then, in stark contrast, at the end of her high-powered and outdone flourish, one would have to scream to be heard over the thunderous applause and approbation.

The standing ovation lasts for minutes. Still being very professional, the singer doesn't make a sound nor face, staying perfectly in character. She throws her head back, tears spilling down both sides of her face and down her rosy cheeks, arms slightly outstretched in a stance that pushes every ounce of her power in her body through her to her voice. The curtain slowly closes across the stage while the crowd continues to cheer.

As soon as she's gone from the audience's sight, she runs off the stage, her heavily curled locks bouncing up and down with her. There's no time to go to her dressing room to change; she and a team of two quickly, and very visibly, shed her sparkly black gown and begin pulling on a new outfit.

"You were great out there," a young Irish man, a stagehand named Rory says, walking up to the her, flushed and starry-eyed.

"Oh, Ror-…um," she stammers, briefly unsure of his name. He's just immigrated from Europe and has the thickest accent and most unusual sayings she's ever heard. Plus, he's a _Roman Catholic_.

"Thank you, but I don't have the time," she says, and turns away from him.

"Oh, of course, I most certainly understand." He runs his hand through his hair nervously, trying to slick the sweat off his palms. "I'll let you be, Ms. Quinn."

His voice dies in the air as Quinn is rushed over to get her make-up and hair fixed. Rory quickly leaves, running onto the stage to start setting up props and chairs. Quinn's golden hair is straightened as best as it can in a matter of minutes. Moments after her shoes are secure on her feet, she saunters back onto stage, winking at a fellow actor, emitting attraction with every swing of her hips.

The lights are dimmed once again, as the second half of the performance begins. Everyone is already back in their seats, not daring to risk missing one second of the play.

* * *

Please leave a review telling me what you thought of it. I'd love any opinions or constructive criticism you have. Next update will be soon and longer :)

...

For more information on my stories, like updating info, visit my fanfiction blog at mj728fanfiction dot blogspot dot com


	2. Chapter 2

**AN: **I love writing and editing this story so much. Normally I become stressed and almost agitated when writing anything, but this I look forward to. I hope it becomes successful.

A little background and character study of two very important players. Enjoy :)

* * *

**Chapter Two**

**_Rachel_**

Rachel can't help her nervous habit of twisting the golden band on her finger as she watches the show from the dusty wings. Though the actors are marvelous, of course, and the music melodious and beautiful, she worries something, or someone, is going to mess up.

She distantly hears her name being called mutedly from farther backstage, but she can't tear her eyes away. People had traveled across _countries_ to come see the show, after the several reviews immensely praising everything from the actors' performances to the props and sets were published in esteemed newspapers. This was the fullest they had ever been, every single seat filled by a person, ranging from the upper middle class that scrapped together enough money to afford a ticket and dressed in the finest clothes they could find, borrowing coats and ornaments and jewelry from friends to make them seem richer, to the most prestigious in America: millionaire oil tycoons, distant cousins of royal houses, suave actors with glamorous actresses on their arms, heirs to railroad fortunes and gold mines. The classes mixed among the seats: a person who worked on road construction during the day constituting of median income could sit next to the wealthiest stockbroker in New York.

But yet no one was judging the person sitting in the seat next to them, not even noticing their clothes or how many jewels they carried on their fingers or around their necks. All eyes were concentrated on the stage.

"Berry!" Lauren Zizes, the maliciously hypocritical and sleazy "director of stagehands", appears from behind Rachel and grips her upper arm tightly with her filthy hand. "You know, it's really not that hard: you hear your name, report to where you're supposed to be. Hm? Why don't we try it?"

She drags Rachel away from the wings and pulls her further back into the dark. Rachel helplessly looks behind her at the fading lights of the stage and gives a hopeless sigh.

"Lauren, why-"

"Mrs. Zizes."

"Mrs. Zizes," Rachel restates, "how many seats are there in the theater total?"

"You think I spend all ma' free time countin' those chairs?"

"Well, do you know if we're full to capacity?"

"Looks like it."

Rachel worriedly looks back to where she was standing and gives her ring another twist.

"Oh hush, it's the finest show in the world and all that crap. There's nothing to worry about. Hell, Ms. Quinn's been called the 'gem of the stage' by Jean Loisel _and_ Antonin Forestier, the toughest critics ever existed. They shut out that German production _Neue Richtungen_, or something like that, after one show. Damn Europeans."

Rachel gives another dire sigh and follows Lauren into the tiny and cramped storage room, lit by a single dusty bulb. She bends over and begins stacking boxes alongside her boss.

The metal ring she restlessly fiddled with was a size too small for her, and since she was always twisting it further into her skin, the base of her finger was turned permanently red, and going on purple.

"Berry, you won't be able to do your job if your finger falls off, now would you? Stop twisting that damn ring or I'll hafta' cut your pay soon for doing half tha' amount of work."

"I'm sorry, I'm just nervous about the play," she says defensively.

"Fiddlin' with a wedding ring is bad luck, ya' know…," Lauren cackles.

"It's not a wedding ring…I mean, it's just my engagement band," Rachel stammers. "I'm too young to get married. Girls these days are waiting until their mid-twenties, even."

"Can that fool even afford you a wedding ring?" Lauren begins uproariously laughing before remembering the play is still going on, even if it is happening behind the thick brick walls of the storage room. She wipes the corner of her eyes with a dirty linen cloth, once starch white, the only thing of her's that could make someone infer that she was a woman.

"Well, at least I have someone willing to marry me, _Lauren_. He may not have a steady job, but he's a nice man. And I don't care if he does have frivolous dreams and plans and isn't sure what he wants to do," she sighs, looking down at her hands helplessly, "maybe someday his newspaper will take off. People like reading news of the high and mighty, no matter how nonfactual.

"You can tell yourself that all you'd like, but honey, all I know is the richer the man is, the longer the marriage lasts." She goes off on another cackling fit and doesn't stop, even when Rachel determinedly says, "We will be together for years. Jacob plans on becoming a reporter soon…and my mother-and I-hope th-that will earn us money."

"Honey, you ain't sure about nothin'."

Rachel keeps her determined stance and refuses to falter in front of her.

"Suit yourself," Lauren says, exiting the room in tears. "We'll just wait and see how unsure of yourself you are on the wedding day, though."

A single, disheartened sigh escapes Rachel as she sinks onto a box and buries her face in her hands.

**_Blaine_**

Blaine's jet-black hair is gelled flat to the side, parted even and straight as an arrow (the new men's style of this roaring era). For the show, to portray his overly professional character David Daniels, he replaces his bow tie with a satin, bright red tie he bought at Saks on the day of the first show, a month a half ago, though it seems like just yesterday. His three-piece black suit is dry cleaned and was pressed earlier today, and his brown leather shoes shone until he could see his reflection in them.

The whole day he ran vocal runs with Quinn, glitzy and glamorous and more than willing to spend the day with him. She told him that he was "a free soul" who knew how to really have fun, and therefore deemed appropriate to waste the hours away with. Plus, they shared the often very intimate scene with each other on the stage, so they had to be well acquainted and get on well anyway.

It was only beneficial to their on-stage presences that the same things interested them. Neither immersed themselves with worrying about lines or songs or scenes, _too much_. Seeing as their talent for musical theatre came so naturally, and they were both acclaimed as the best stage actors of their day, every second of their time leading up to the night's show was not spent staring at their scripts or going through their songs. Blaine and Quinn would simply go through each number once, complete with choreography, and then blow off time in between. The show was running for weeks now and Blaine couldn't even begin to think of how many times he had sung the opening number in its entirety. They viewed spending a full day rehearsing quite wasteful, and opted to instead lounge around in their dressing rooms and do all sorts of things, from delighting in playful gossip to idling reading newspapers, the outlandishly fake sensationalist headlines and the very factual.

But now, it's less than an hour till show time; the stage being frantically set up, every character manicured and made-up into perfection, and the lights and feebly sound quality checked over and over until the guests began arriving. He predicted that tonight would be the beginning of many shows in which only the richest of the rich would attend. Once news of the theatre's spectacular show spread across the nation (and eventually the world, Blaine and Quinn liked to think) every member of high and low society alike scrambled for a chance to go see it. The play's run would be many months, maybe even bordering on years, but everyone wanted to attend _now_, perhaps so they could be one of the several lucky thousand who could honestly claim, "Oh yes, I saw it in the second month of its run. _Of course_, the tickets were so hard to acquire, but you know of our connections." Anyone who had any type of connection to the splendid, internationally known theater was immediately deemed special by anyone's standards: high-class, wanted, exclusive.

With all the demand, tickets would be overpriced and sold out for weeks now; the only people attending tonight, and for many performances afterward, would be solely the highest of the high-class.

"20 minutes till show time, Blaine," a stagehand reports to him, popping his head into and dressing room and disappearing as quickly as he came. Even though this is another one of the countless performances, nervous butterflies begin fluttering around in his stomach. He considers his greatest downfall in life to be stage fright. Really, to his mother and father and grade school drama teacher, it's a miracle Blaine managed to become the lead star of such an acclaimed play, and therefore a hit actor. He can oh-so-clearly remember running off the creaky stage in third grade after mistaking his one line during the annual Christmas pageant of _Shining Bright Liberty_, written and directed by his teacher with the greatest fervor Blaine had ever seen any suburban, low-wage employee of a town with a population of 3,000 do. After blushing beet red and sending the audience into polite laughter, he wouldn't even consider getting up on stage again for years, until the majority of his elementary school friends claimed to have no recollection of the "incident".

Blaine was really horribly self-conscious (a far worse asset than stage-fright, though not to him), and wouldn't accept one's praise on something he accomplished until he believed it done to the best of his ability. Always finding imperfections, errors, tiny little details that, if changed, would make a world of a difference in everything he did (or so he believed).

Therefore, he made sure each day that his suit stayed perfectly tailored, his tie free of blemishes and wrinkles, his hair gelled and styled to his liking, and his expensive Italian imported shoes free of scuffs and incidental squeaks. But even so, he was an actor, undeniably dramatic and artsy and, as Quinn delighted in, "a free spirit". Such a conflicting character was Blaine Anderson that it took years of intimacy to truly know him, unless you were someone who shared the likeness of his inner mind. Fortunately, for him and the audience, his female counterpart was one of the few who did.

* * *

So what are your thoughts? Anything to review on Blaine and Rachel's roles? Leave a comment please and any constructive criticism, thank you :)


End file.
